Sentiment Analysis

Also known as: customer sentiment, voice sentiment

Sentiment analysis is the automatic classification of the emotional tone of a text or voice interaction — typically positive, neutral, or negative, sometimes with finer-grained categories like frustration, satisfaction, or urgency. In voice interactions sentiment can be inferred from word choice, tone, pace, and silence patterns.

The practical use case for sentiment in voice agents is escalation: an inbound call where the caller's sentiment trends negative across the first 30 seconds is a candidate for immediate human handoff, even if the agent could technically complete the task. Frustration compounds; getting to a human early prevents a worse outcome.

Sentiment analysis is not a feature that solves customer-experience problems on its own — it's a routing input. Treating sentiment as a metric to optimize toward (e.g. 'positive sentiment %' as a KPI) tends to produce surface-level changes without addressing the underlying issue. Treat it as a signal, not a target.